Flight to San Jose
So today, I flew to San Jose and back. I went to the Mozilla office (which is right next to the infamous Googleplex) and met Brendan Eich. This, for me, was an altogether surreal experience. I’ve never traveled that far…
Hallucinated Abstract
I actually thought this up around sometime in Feb 2007; I had been reading Sipser’s Intro to Computer Science text, and hallucinated the following abstract while drifting off to sleep: This paper presents an isomorphism between the set of problems…
Geeking out
I am a dyed-in-the-wool geek. When I first moved into my apartment here at UCI, and found out that all my stuff didn’t quite fit into my room, what did I do about it? I drafted the floor plan of…
Threaded Image Tiling
For quite some time now I’ve wanted to do a program that demonstrates Image Tiling using threads. Everyone should be familiar with the results of this technique, it’s used in Google Maps, Google Earth, NASA Worldwind, KDE’s Marble, and the…
Futon Barter
So, last Sunday, I purchased a Futon through Craigslist. On my trip back from picking it up, I lost a piece. A certain plastic part that fits in a wood slot, so it can slide up and down the rail…
First week at UCI
My first week has been rather nice and relaxing. I’ve got much of my paperwork covered with respect to RAship, ID card, finding shops and stuff around the area. My roomates are cool and mellow (and have similar philosophical/religious views)….
Moved In
I am finally moved in to my place at UCI. It turns out that I own 1 Toyota Tundra load of books, and 2 Chevy Cavalier loads of miscellaneous crap. Also, I found out that, as a result of stuff…
Atheists can pray too
Two weeks ago, a good friend of mine asked me a hypothetical question: I have a daughter with leukemia; The doctors say she might not pull through. Will you pray for her? Well, as an atheist this puts me in…
OCW does GEB
From Reasonable Deviations: MIT has done a course titled Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey. Video lectures are available through OCW.
Thinking about Thinking
So far, in my reading of Minsky’s Society of Mind, his hypothesis, that the mind is an agglomeration of specialized agents working in conjunction with each other completely meshes with observations of my own behavior. In particular, I’ve noticed that…